Imaging a large number of machines

What do the folks in larger environments use to image a large number of machines at a single time? One of our locations does refurbishment of machines and we have 2000 Windows 8 laptops to be imaged. Is using MDT/WDS the best way to do this?

They have been using RPK over WDS for Windows 7. Will RPK and MDT play nice together on the same WDS server?

The last time I did something like this was with Windows XP back in like 2005. I used UDPCast, mostly because I'm a Linux guy. IIRC we also tried the proprietary Ghost software but it didn't work as well.

If you can get every laptop connected to the same Ethernet segment all at the same time, you can image them simultaneously. But make sure you don't have other stuff on that network, as it will probably not like the network being saturated.

So you just need to build one laptop, then copy its disk exactly to all the other laptops. Nothing required but the laptops themselves and some network connectivity between them.

If you don't need to add them to your AD, you don't need to worry about resetting the SID or running sysprep or whatever.

You really have a few different options available to you when it comes to deployment. You should definitely look into using WDS in tandem with MDT since WDS offers the ability to perform multicast deployments.

By using MDT in tandem with WDS you will be able to keep a thin image, which could be the base install.wim from the Microsoft Windows Operating System media. You can create a new standard client task sequence for the newly captured image of your reference machine and you can add all your necessary settings such as domainjoin, systemlocale, time zone, etc. You can then add all necessary drivers specific to each hardware configuration and MDT will install the proper drivers based on PnP calls. Applications can be installed as post installation tasks, so when a new version of an application or driver is released it can be changed in MDT easily. There is no need to refresh the image.

Finally, you can integrate it with Windows Update or WSUS to make sure the deployment is fully updated; alternatively, you can put the updates into MDT as packages to be installed during deployment.